Why Trump’s on solid ground with the Alien Enemies Act

Just read the text

A communion of Saints?

Forget about the fact that John Adams’ and the Fifth Congress’s Alien and Sedition Acts were not exactly popular. Ever. Or specifically that the Alien Friends Act trampled on the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment as vigorously as the Sedition Act trampled on the free expression clause of the First, which the Founders — Jefferson as well as Adams — weren’t all that hesitant to violate for political purposes.

Where do you think Lincoln learned to suspend Habeas corpus? Compared to these guys, Donald Trump is a Boy Scout.

Don’t like him? Think he’s a tyrant? Too bad. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is still on the books, as part of the U.S. Code, and it grants him the power to do what he’s done with those Tren de Aragua sweetie pies.

No lawyer am I, nor even much of a scholar, but I can read.

Indeed, I can read as well as those who read the Fourteenth Amendment and conclude that it confers citizenship upon any infant just “dropped from its dam” on this side of the Rio Grande. Irrespective of the authors’ intent, their words seem to say as much.

So here then are the words I read in the Alien Enemies Act [the bolding is mine]:

. . . whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.

We’ve all been taught that or is a coordinating conjunction, and that the terms it conjoins are therefore “separate but equal” in significance — either will suffice. So, although there is no declaration of war making formal belligerents out of the U.S. and Venezuela, and although some will quibble that the use of the word invasion requires the presence of weapons of war — it doesn’t, as I understand the long history of the word, especially after four years of watching well-organized, well-funded “caravans” of well-fed, well-clothed, well-transported migrants marching up through South America toward the American border, attended to logistically by dozens of NGOs and criminal cartels who provide them with cellphones and special apps by which to facilitate their eventual “breaking and entering”; the absence of these two conditions by no means invalidates the characterization of the infusion of the well-organized Venezuelan Tren de Aragua into our population centers as a predatory incursion.

As for Trump’s “public proclamation” of the event, we’ve been hearing it both before and after his election, most recently in the formal statement released by The White House on March 15.

The only remaining sticking point is whether this incursion has in fact been perpetrated by the nation or government of Venezuela. Presumably Trump isn’t lying when he avers that the Venezuelan government has released these people from its prisons deliberately, not simply to be rid of them but in order that they wreak their mischief elsewhere — in line with “the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States” — and that this constitutes a hostile act.

Bear in mind, too, that America’s present enemies are not so much “foreign nations or governments” as they are dark “globalist” powers for whom the United States is a major impediment. We’re now immersed in a different kind of warfare, working through nations and governments, its principal weapons being gargantuan sums of money from shadowy sources, of the kind required to move millions of “destabilizing”human pawns around the global chessboard.

Whatever. Alien enemies are alien enemies, and Trump has checked the boxes that give him the authority to send these tattooed TDA demons to their proper hell in El Salvador. “The Savior” — gotta love the irony.

In this modern theater of warfare, “enemy combatants” from Trump’s perspective include practitioners of “lawfare” such as the D.C. District Court’s chief judge, James Boasberg, who appears intent not so much on protecting civil liberties as on keeping TDA dirtbags on American soil.

Just because.

As if in anticipation of such opposition, the Adams crowd gave us Sec. 2 of their Act, which reads as follows [again with my bolding]:

. . . after any proclamation shall be made as aforesaid, it shall be the duty of the several courts of the United States . . . and of the several judges and justices of the courts of the United States . . . to cause such alien or aliens to be duly apprehended and convened before such court, judge, or justice; and after a full examination and hearing . . . and sufficient cause therefor appearing, shall and may order such alien or aliens to be removed out of the territory of the United States, or to give sureties of their good behaviour . . . .

I am reminded of the Catholic notion of The Communion of Saints. Just as Saint Michael purportedly reached across space and time to inspire the peasant adolescent Joan of Arc to curb an English invasion of her native land, so “Saint” Adams hands down to President Trump the tool with which to pressure the judiciary into compliance with his defense of the People.

Yes, Boasberg being an appointee of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the latter has perfunctorily demurred to Trump’s suggestion of the former’s impeachment.

Let’s hope it’s perfunctory. This is no time for magic shows such as saving Obamacare by converting its individual insurance mandate into a tax, when Obama himself had argued vigorously that it wasn’t.

This time the Nation itself needs saving, from all manner of predatory incursions, of which this one is but the most conspicuous, obvious example.